From Jack’s Abby:
Co-Owner and Brewer Jack Hendler says, “Welcome to the new brewery! So when we originally opened over at Morton street we had 5,000 sq feet. This facility is 67000 sq feet. We can produce probably 125,000 bbls of beer a year in this space- and we’ve planned for the future. So you may be able to see, this glycol plumbing, we have all these valves that are sticking out in case the demand is there, all we need to do is put more tanks in and we’re good to go.
So this is what our brewers do now, a little different from the old place. One thing about this brewhouse is that it’s 100% automated- so there’s not a single valve that we have to manually open or close. So there’s no variation brewer to brewer and it will allow us to put out better beer- a higher quality product. So let’s take a little tour! We can head right on up to the brewers platform and check out what’s going on. All this equipment came from Italy and it was custom designed to our needs, to our brewing style, so it does decoction which is a really cool feature our other brewery didn’t, which means we actually cook the grain in a very traditional German style process. And the other thing that’s really unique and cool about this is the hopback- this entire vessel here is dedicated to using whole leaf hops. Beers like Hoponius, beers like Excess, any of our really hoppy brews will use whole leaf hops. Look at this, we have a fancy computer, so I can turn the light on so we can see inside that tank. We are now draining it from the previous brew and getting it prepped to take the next brew. So all of our beer will be pumped from the brewhouse to those tanks. Those tanks down the middle are 240 bbls and these tanks here are 80 bbls. So a lot of our specialty beer and one-offs will go in the smaller tanks and our cores will be brewed in the larger tanks.
We are going to still bottle but most of our production is going to move to cans- so we have to buy 200,000 cans, per brand, as a minimum. It takes up a lot of space! We do have that space here which is why we were able to move to cans. This is our Master Can Tronic- this is going to put out 10,000 cans an hour for us. This thing will take a full pallet of cans, lift it up to that top de-pall[etizer], it will then get on that de-pall, the cans come down this shoot, they get rinsed, they go into the filler, the seamer, then they go all the way back around until they get to the packer.
I hope you enjoyed that quick trip through the brewhouse, canning line, packaging area, cellar, warehouse- there’s a lot going on here. Check us out Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, come to the beer hall and see what’s going on . We’ll soon be giving tours so stay posted. I’m Jack from Jack’s Abby Craft Lagers, thanks for watching.”
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